Page:The London Guide and Stranger's Safeguard.djvu/234

218 be pitied who get into such trammels; but failing into one difficulty, draws him on to another; and the endeavour to extricate himself by one factitious acceptance but brings on a second and a third. The forced endeavours to negociate these, bring his condition to the knowledge of the Swindlers; who, taking advantage of his situation, demand peremptorily, under pain of disclosure—other and more copious sacrifices of his real creditors' property; and the disgraceful alliance (as it is considered) attaches to his character through life. When he has gone through the Alembic of the Gazette, or the Insolvent Debtor's Court, he is not (as he ought to be) estimated among the honest but unfortunate victims of the times in which we live, but is driven by the universal ill opinion of his former friends, companions, and associates, to join the deprecated set among whom mere accident had thrown him, in the hour of his distress. All our readers must know how little commiseration fails to the lot of the poor insolvent, against whom no imputation can by possibility be raised, [the hand that holds this pen hath signed to the fact] how then can he expect to come back into society, against whom malignity can thus point her finger? He is driven out, to add one more to